Gabriel Shipton, the brother of jailed leaker Julian Assange, will attend President Joe Biden's State of the Union address on Thursday at the invitation of Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.).
The invitation is meant as a pointed message to the Biden administration, which has been trying to extradite Assange from Britain to try him for his role in publishing classified information through his website WikiLeaks.
Massie signed a bipartisan letter calling for Assange's release on February 20.
"The prosecution of Julian Assange is a direct attack on the 1st amendment and the freedom of the press to publish information in the public interest," Shipton said in a statement released by Massie's office. "Rep. Massie is a fierce defender of these rights having introduced legislation that would protect my brother Julian and put an end to the espionage act being weaponised against publishers."
In July 2022, Massie proposed the Espionage Act Reform Act alongside Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) in order to protect journalists from being prosecuted as spies. Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) proposed a companion bill in the Senate.
The Espionage Act punishes anyone who transmits classified data. The reform bills would limit prosecutions to government employees who violate their security clearances, as well as foreign agents and others who try to buy or trade classified documents.
Assange, an Australian publisher, attracted the ire of the U.S. government in the early 2010s for publishing classified data provided by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, including a database of U.S. diplomatic cables and a video of a U.S. Army helicopter gunning down a news crew in Iraq.
The Obama administration initially concluded that it could not charge Assange because of the "New York Times problem": If WikiLeaks could be prosecuted, so could mainstream newspapers that dealt with government sources and published the classified information.
The Trump administration, however, charged Assange with computer hacking, which it later upgraded to Espionage Act violations. (Mike Pompeo, then the CIA director, also reportedly considered kidnapping or murdering Assange.) The Biden administration has continued trying to extradite Assange from Britain, where he was arrested in April 2019 after his political asylum was revoked. He has remained in a high-security prison in southeast London since.
"The U.S. government's ongoing effort to prosecute Julian Assange threatens the First Amendment rights of Americans and should be opposed," Massie said in his statement. "During his term in office, I asked President Trump to pardon Mr. Assange, and I was disappointed by his failure to do so. President Biden should drop the criminal charges currently being pursued by the Department of Justice."
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